SOURCE: Gerson, Carole. “Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 2 (summer 1997): 5-21.

[In the following excerpt, Gerson uses sketches and anecdotes from Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush to portray Moodie's image of Native women.]

In her 1986 essay, “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” American literary critic Jane Tompkins demonstrates the impossibility of establishing historical “truth.” She concludes that the post-structuralist reader seeking the history of European-Native relations can only navigate among the various and conflicting subject-positions of the recorders and scholarly interpreters of the past, ultimately recognizing that, like them, she herself necessarily operates within a limited perspective. Resisting the temptation to retreat to “a metadiscourse about epistemology,” she is left with the task of “piec[ing] together the story of European-Indian relations as best [she] can” (76), discomforted by the ease with which the academic mind can relinquish the pursuit of “what really happened” (60) in favour of a more abstract inquiry into how we think we know what happened. More recently, Stephen Greenblatt circumvents Tompkins's problem with historiography by focussing on the representative anecdote as “the principal register of the unexpected and hence of the encounter with difference. … Anecdotes then are among the principal products of a culture's representational technology” (2-3).

Susanna Strickland Moodie and Catharine Parr Strickland Traill are two Canadian writers whose contact narratives invite the application of Greenblatt's observation. Their literary transmission of their settlement experiences after their arrival in Upper Canada in 1832 underscores the importance of woman-to-woman engagement in European-First Nations interaction, and at the same time demonstrates the appropriateness of the anecdote in communicating this experience. In their vocabulary, the representative anecdote is often subsumed under the term “sketch,” a word that invokes visual along with narrative elements of representation. “I sketch from Nature, and the picture's true,” claims the epigraph to Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (1852). When the Strickland sisters convey to their British readers their relations with the first people of North America, they become especially cognizant of the value of the sketch or anecdote. Traill's 1848 article, “A Visit to the Camp of the Chippewa Indians,” opens by addressing the curiosity of her British correspondent: “You ask me if I have seen anything of the Indians lately. I am glad you were interested in my former accounts of them, and will supply you with any little anecdotes I may collect from time to time, for your amusement” (33). Even more cogently, Moodie justifies her assorted anecdotes of her interactions with her “Indian friends” with the observation that “The real character of a people can be more truly gathered from such seemingly trifling incidents than from any ideas we may form of them from the great facts in their history” (309). I will expand upon this privileging of “seemingly trifling incidents” over “great facts” later in my discussion of the strategies of textual representation developed by Moodie and Traill to record their encounter with the First Nations women they came to know in eastern Ontario. Moodie's account is localized in Roughing It in the Bush, written retrospectively after moving to Belleville from the backwoods where she had lived during the 1830s. Traill, who spent more of her life in rural communities, consistently documents Native women in works issued over nearly the entire duration of her long life in Canada, from The Backwoods of Canada (1836) to Pearls and Pebbles; or, Notes of an Old Naturalist (1894).

To appreciate the textual challenge facing these two literary British gentlewomen and the distinctiveness of their response, it is first necessary to consider a number of elements concerning both the original literary context in which they wrote and that within which they have subsequently been placed as early Canadian authors. These include the figure of the Noble Savage in relation to the subjectivity of Native Women in nineteenth-century Canadian and British literature, the position of women writers in the discourse of Empire, and the different genres in which these settler-authors chose to write. I therefore begin by positioning Moodie and Traill—or rather, our current reading of their work—against the background of canonical texts that have shaped our comprehension of the literary representation of First Nations people in early Canadian literature, especially with regard to Native women as subjects and/or “white” women as authors.

When they emigrated to British North America in 1832, Susanna Moodie and her sister Catharine Parr Traill were fully familiar with the construction of the Noble Savage that was a long-standing cliché by the time it appeared in Adam Kidd's The Huron Chief, a long poem published in Montreal in 1830:

And I would tell the polished man,
Brought up in Europe's fashioned plan,
          That never could his formal art,
                                                  Or all that school-taught lore has given,
          Such graceful happiness impart,
                                                  As cheers the Indian's forest heaven—
                                                  Who give, or asks, with greatest ease,
                                                  Whate'er his heart or soul can please.

(453-60)

At mid-century, Alexander McLachlan demonstrated the ease with which the convention could be appropriated to his critique of Euro-Canadian materialism when he denounced the corruption of the Victorian industrial city by representing the Indian's experience as freedom and economic self-reliance:

Oh! God I would rather be
An Indian in the wood,
And range through the forest free
In search of my daily food.

(The Emigrant 27)

The romantic ideology underpinning these equations of the Indian with natural happiness and ease, in opposition to urbanized Europe, was frequently countered by the actual experience of the New World pioneer. As Anne Langton wrote back to relatives in England in July, 1839

The old world is the world of romance and poetry. I daresay our lakes, waterfall, rapids, canoes, forests, Indian encampments, sound very well to you dwellers in the suburbs of a manufacturing town; nevertheless I assure you there cannot well be a more unpoetical and anti-romantic existence than ours.

(94)

Langton inverts the conventional romantic binary used by Kidd and McLachlan but does not replace it. The Indian (to retain the term used by the authors under discussion) remains a figure constructed by Eurocentric notions of cultural value: visible as a generalization but usually invisible as an individual human being, and thus available to occupy the position of the Other frequently assigned to the gypsy in European romanticism.¹ This invisibility was sustained by the belief that North American Aboriginal peoples were a “fated race,” to cite a recurring phrase, whose destined disappearance before “the great tide of civilization” (Jameson, II 240) was statistically demonstrable. As Anna Jameson observed in 1838: “The white population throughout America is supposed to double itself on average in twenty-three years; in about the same proportion do the Indians perish before them” (II 107).

The figure of the disappearing Indian inherited by late-nineteenth-century Canadian poets, a diminishment that allowed them to construct freely Native characters whose fictionality serves the ideology of British-Canadian supremacy, has significantly shaped the prevailing construction of Canadian literary identity, based as this has been upon the canonization of several poets from this period as foundational authors. Of especial interest is the frequency with which the Native characters in their work are women, their biological function (or malfunction) an obvious factor in what the European viewed as the inevitable and necessary disappearance of their people. Isabella Valancy Crawford, for all her reputed sensitivity to Native culture, virtually erases Native people from the landscape being colonized in her 1885 settlement poem, “Malcolm's Katie.”² Native mythic imagery (inspired by Longfellow) animates the landscape and the turning of the seasons, but Native persons appear principally as the tenor of extended metaphors. The only Native character to exist outside Crawford's figurative language is equally “unreal”: the fictive Indian wife given to Max by the lying Alfred—an image chosen to represent the degeneration of both Max and the indigenous society being eradicated by the “panting, human waves” (II 201) of European settlers. The poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott more obviously inscribes the disappearance of First Nations Canadians into its repeated focus on Indian women, whose intermingling with European men poetically enacts the assimilation programmed for the Native population by Scott's Department of Indian Affairs (“The Onondaga Madonna,” “At Gull Lake: August 1810,” “The Half-breed Girl”). Recent research by Anne McClintock and Robert Young, on the development of scientific racism in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, situates these poems about the decline of Canada's Indians within the discourse of degeneration through métissage that is essential to our understanding of their context. Susanna Moodie's comment about the “sad falling-off of the Indian character” in “half-castes” who possess “the worst qualities of both parents in an eminent degree” (322) represents an earlier phase of the attitudes that would later be consolidated into the identification of racial purity with national purity.³ Scott's Native women who do not dilute the Native population through their sexual involvement with Europeans emblematize the decline of their people through old age and the processes of history (“Watkewenies,” “The Forsaken,” “Incident at Lake Manitou”). Sanction of the canonical poets' vision of the disappearing Indian has been demonstrated on at least one occasion by an editorial view of the expendable Indian, with significant consequences for later readers and scholars. Carl F. Klinck's excision of Moodie's description of her “Indian Friends” from his 1962 New Canadian Library edition of Roughing It in the Bush (a decision he later regretted, 157) has resulted in the failure of all critics using this text, the only version of Roughing It in print for many years, to recognize this important portion of Moodie's experience.

In contrast to the pattern of European/Aboriginal, real/ideal binarism considered thus far, I would like to turn to several woman-authored texts that offer accounts of direct engagements with women from another culture. The meeting in the “contact zone” (to use Mary Louise Pratt's term, 6-7) is as much a woman-to-woman connection as a European/Native contrast. Hence the mode of the encounter is frequently not oppositional but experiential: not MacLachlan's “I would rather be …” but Catharine Parr Traill's “I must tell you. …” In the latter instance, Traill is writing about a moment of physical contact expressive of trust, while travelling in a canoe with Indian women and children: “I must tell you that … a nice brown girl, Anne Muskrat, fell asleep with her head on my lap …” (“Visit” 38). The distinction I am drawing between externalizing and experiential modes of representation appears in one of the first woman-authored texts identified with Canada, The History of Emily Montague (1769), where Frances Brooke distinguishes between the masculine, objective discourse of Ed Rivers and the engaged, contactual discourse of Arabella Fermor. To his sister in London, Rivers writes a general, informative description of the Hurons as Noble Savages.⁴ It is Arabella, however, who details a specific instance of meeting and sharing a picnic with a group of Native women who, to her amazement, seem to possess absolute freedom of movement (49-50).⁵ The contrasts manifested in these Canadian examples are typical of women's travel writing in general, according to Sara Mills's analysis of such work from 1850 to 1930:

[W]hat the narrators write about the people amongst whom they travelled and their attitude to those people is surprisingly similar and seems to differ from the writings of male travel writers in the stress they lay on personal involvement and relationships with people of the other culture and in the less authoritarian stance they take vis-à-vis narrative voice.

(21)

Bridget Orr further theorizes that “there is a peculiarity in the position of women within the imperialist culture, that she already figures an alterity which can be mobilized in diverse ways.” She continues, “It is demonstrable that much women's travel writing does subvert the dominant terms of its discourse, but … the question remains of the extent to which another relation—a dialogic relation with the other—may be identified” (155). Central to this dialogic relation is “a recognition and acceptance of the irreducible alterity of each to the other,” an aim that Orr concedes is “clearly utopian” (156), but none the less laudable.

Before specifically considering the ways in which the writings of Traill and Moodie meet Orr's quest for a “construction of encounters with the other as productive meetings in which the autonomy and difference of each partner is left intact” (156), I would like to introduce several intersecting factors that further contextualize the Strickland sisters' experiential mode of discourse. One influence we should not discount is the representation of Indians in the British literary culture in which the Stricklands were educated and lived until their emigration, two principal figures being Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans. North American Indians seldom appear in Wordsworth's verse other than to supply a few images of noble savagery or exoticism (e.g. The Prelude I 297-300; VI 664). The notable exception is his “Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (1798), based on an incident in Samuel Hearne's diary and now recognized as a background text to Duncan Campbell Scott's frequently anthologized 1905 poem, “The Forsaken.”⁶ Scott's narrative is in the third person, recounted by an unnamed narrator whose objectifying Eurocentric stance and diction substantially problematize our reading of this poem today. But Wordsworth's poem is in the first person, granting voice and subjectivity to a Native character in a way that Scott never does. First-person Indian narrators also appear in a number of poems by Felicia Hemans, a poet much admired in the literary milieu of the Strickland family.⁷ Whether or not the poetry of Wordsworth and Hemans set a direct precedent for Moodie and Traill, it does connect the romantic predisposition to individualize specific, interesting characters—who may on occasion be Native North Americans—with the Strickland sisters' literary practice of naming and describing distinct individuals, including a number of Indian persons. Moreover, Wordsworth's emphasis on the maternal emotions of his abandoned Indian woman anticipates Moodie and Traill's mother-to-mother connection with the Indian women they meet, which is one of the continuing discursive threads of this paper.

Another factor contributing to their mode of representing Native women may be the uncertain position of colonial women within normative patriarchal power relations. Laura E. Donaldson observes that

… describing the position of a white, middle-class woman either as oppressed or oppressive might vary in terms of her racial or economic status; indeed, she can sometimes be both simultaneously—in a patriarchal society, her femaleness dictates her subjection as sexual object, and in a racist society, her whiteness dictates her often unwitting participation in sustaining a system of white supremacy.

(34)

Powerful as white but disempowered as female, Moodie and Traill share with Native women some marginal space on the outskirts of frontier culture. Less articulately feminist than their fellow author, traveller Anna Jameson, they present anecdotally rather than analytically the subjection of women in their own social class, such as the plight of Mrs N. in Moodie's chapter, “The Walk to Dummer,” as well as in Native culture, as in Traill's generalization that “Gentle, patient, accustomed to be ruled from childhood, the Indian woman bears, suffers and submits without complaint” (Pearls 222).

The generic identity of the Strickland sisters' settlement writing is the third major background factor I wish to introduce. In her 1981 article on Moodie and Mrs Trollope, Janet Giltrow demonstrates the extent to which the rhetorical stance of Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings is that of the travel writer. Placing the non-fiction of Moodie and Traill in this genre elucidates their own self-placement within the spectrum of contemporary literary activity. On the one hand, Moodie and Traill express the uncertainty of many women writers daring to assume the authority of the travel narrator, whose heroic adventures and breadth of knowledge were conventionally gendered masculine (Mills 77-83). But on the other, they craftily turn their subordinate position to their own advantage. In Life in the Clearings (1853), Moodie deftly demurs as a woman while at the same time manipulating her power as the narrator when she addresses her reader:

Dear patient reader! … Allow me a woman's privilege of talking of all sorts of things by the way. Should I tire you with my desultory mode of conversation, bear with me charitably, and take into account the infirmities incidental to my gossiping sex and age. … The little knowledge I possess, I impart freely, and wish that it was more profound and extensive, for your sake.

(20)⁸

Disclaiming narrative unity allows the woman author to transgress in other ways as well: by calling attention to herself as a woman writer, and by venturing beyond the limited spheres of activity deemed appropriate for Victorian women (Mills 77). Moreover, announcing a mode of apparent casualness enhances the sense of immediacy characteristic of the anecdote, but often unavailable in more structured discourse.

Approaching the Stricklands' settlement narratives as travel writing accounts for the fact that First Nations Canadians appear far more frequently in these authors' public texts—books, poems, and periodical articles—than in the private correspondence with family and friends which is now becoming available.⁹ Published in Britain and addressed to readers back home, their best-known works include the requisite descriptions of indigenous persons expected in travellers' tales. While the distinctiveness of these writings derives from the way Moodie and Traill personalize their material, we must also remember that the narrators of the texts intended for public consumption are constructed figures whose narratives may be shaped as much by discursive conventions and ideological concerns as by the desire to document lived experience. Hence I shall argue that Moodie and Traill negotiated past the silences imposed by Victorian decorum, especially upon middle-class women, by expressing some of their own publicly unspeakable desires and concerns through their literary representations of Indian women.

In 1832, Catharine Parr Traill immigrated to British North America as a 30-year-old bride who would bear nine children over the next 15 years; Susanna Moodie arrived the same year as a 28-year-old new mother, carrying in her arms the first of her seven children. In a ground-breaking consideration of the maternal perspective in Roughing It in the Bush, Bina Freiwald links Moodie's modes of representation to her identity as mother, noting that “There is always a child at Susanna's side” (158). Following upon Freiwald's recognition of the importance of the maternal eye, Helen Buss deconstructs “Moodie's restraint in her public text” (86) by seeking the untellable aspects of her autobiography through her private letters and her stories about other settlers. Yet somewhat surprisingly, both critics overlook Moodie's account of her “Indian Friends.”¹⁰ In the following discussion, I argue that linking the sisters' individual position as mature middle-class British mothers to their representation of Native women in their travel writing and their fiction yields important insights into their experiences of selfhood and Otherness.¹¹

Catharine and Susanna both arrived in the Canadas expecting to meet Indians. Traill's presentation of Native peoples in her pre-emigration juvenile novel, The Young Emigrants (1826), drawn from the writings of several travellers,¹² reveals her preconceived admiration of Indians' ecological knowledge and survival skills and her discomfort with the harder work given to Micmac and Iroquois women. Moodie came to North America with notions of racial equality shaped by her strong commitment to the British anti-slavery movement.¹³ The sisters also brought with them the outlook of their original cultural context, their humanitarian ideals contained within a framework of social class based on “education,” meaning good manners as well as academic knowledge. Their recorded engagements with Natives thus involve frequent negotiation with stereotypes of the Noble Savage, locally represented, for example, in my earlier citation from Adam Kidd's The Huron Chief, published in Montreal just two years before the Strickland sisters landed in British North America. Hence Moodie opens her lengthy account of the Indians living near Peterborough by declaring them “a people whose beauty, talents, and good qualities have been overrated, and invested with a poetical interest which they scarcely deserve” (Roughing it 298) in order to separate the distinct men and women she has come to know from the Eurocentric generalizations she once shared with her readers. This involves a leap from the generic “Indian” to named individuals: Moodie variously introduces “the old chief, Peter Nogan” (300), his son John Nogan, his sister-in-law Mrs. Tom Nogan, the Muskrat family, old Snowstorm, Jacob, Susan Moore and Betty Cow; Traill likewise identifies members of the Nogan¹⁴ and Muskrat families as well as Nancy Boland and Mary Anne Fron.

It is important to recognize the degree to which ideology of class overrides racial difference in Moodie's writing, as in her first reference to Native peoples in Roughing It in the Bush, where she constructs an image of the Noble Savage specifically to critique European culture. Distressed by the rowdiness of Irish and Scottish steerage passengers finally released at the quarantine station at Grosse Ile, she generalizes:

I had heard and read much of savages, and have since seen, during my long residence in the bush, somewhat of uncivilised life; but the Indian is one of Nature's gentlemen—he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians who form the surplus of over-populous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.

(20-21; also 314)

To a gentlewoman like Moodie, Indians, as “Nature's gentlemen,” can be perceived as less Other than the lower classes of Great Britain (especially the Irish).¹⁵ Introducing Native peoples as gentlefolk—who, unlike servants, are invited to eat at the Moodies' table—helps validate their individuality as human beings. Moodie's observations combine condescension and respect: she finds the local Mississauga Indians physically ugly and often childlike (in line with conventional notions of noble savages and “primitive” indigenous peoples), but also gifted with “great taste” (301), “a fine ear for music” (304), and “deep reverence for the Supreme Being” (306). More importantly, she discovers that generalizations are inadequate; to repeat her sentence cited at the beginning of this paper, “The real character of a people can be more truly gathered from such seemingly trifling incidents than from any ideas we may form of them from the great facts in their history, and this is my reason for detailing events which might otherwise appear insignificant and unimportant” (309). The title of this chapter refers to “Our Indian Friends”; for Moodie, friendship must be demonstrated in concrete anecdotes, not simply proclaimed as an abstraction. Not only do Indians come to her home out of curiosity and for shelter; the European and Native women also exchange purely social visits (313-14; 496-98).

In Moodie's representational practice, a distinct qualitative difference emerges between her accounts of Native men and those of Native women. In her anecdotes, the men are more often disadvantaged by cultural differences and misunderstandings, whereas the women receive her affection, admiration and respect. Bound in with these genuinely positive feelings is the way the incidents involving women can be read as projections of Moodie's own gender-based fears and concerns, arising in part from their shared maternal perspective. While discussion of Roughing It in the Bush must distinguish the historic personage of Susanna Moodie from her constructed self-representation as the naïve settler whose journey from innocence to experience provides the narrative framework of the book,¹⁶ the narrated figure may also be read as the reflection of the historic. Coping with frequent pregnancies that cannot be overtly described, and at the same time feeling victimized by smart “Yankees,” Moodie projects her vulnerability into the tellable story of “a young squaw … near to becoming a mother” who is cruelly cheated out of a valuable bowl by an “unprincipled settler” (317). Continually fearful for the health and safety of her children (a major theme of her personal correspondence), she recounts the heart-breaking story of Elizabeth Iron, who tramps through the snow seeking in vain medicine for her dying child. Moodie was dreadfully afraid of wild animals and insisted on emigrating to Canada rather than South Africa because of her husband's dramatic tales of encounters with elephants and lions; consequently, the bravery of a Native woman who coolly knifes an attacking bear so astonishes her self-projected character (to whom even cows are terrifying) that she breaks into rhythmic alliteration reminiscent of heroic Anglo-Saxon verse: “What iron nerves these people must possess, when even a woman could dare and do a deed like this!” (304). Dislocated in an alien environment where her survival often seems precarious, Moodie marvels at Mrs Tom Nogan's hunting skills (314) and Mrs Muskrat's ability to predict the weather (498). If we read Roughing It in the Bush as a narrative of female self-empowerment, we can see that its protagonist's often painful acquisition of self-confidence, knowledge and survival skills develops within the context of abilities and attitudes already possessed by the women native to the land to which Moodie had immigrated.

We must be careful, however, not to remove her from her historical milieu. For all Moodie's sympathetic interest in Native North Americans, Roughing It in the Bush, as an “anti-conquest” narrative to use Mary Louise Pratt's term (7), inevitably participates in the colonial destruction it deplores. Moodie grieves that “people with such generous impulses should be degraded and corrupted by civilised men; that a mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them, pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly and surely sweeping them from the earth” (318), without having the knowledge to recognize that the Indian boy perishing from consumption (307-8) is a victim of European disease. Similarly complicitous is her linguistic transformation of the “dry cedar-swamp … their usual place of encampment for many years” (299) to “our swamp” (311), the shift in pronoun (“their” to “our”) verbally enacting the material dispossession of hunters and gatherers by an imposed system of land ownership. As a woman of her time, she easily accepts the notion of Native traditions and artifacts being commodified as entertainments and souvenirs (Clearings 178-79, 287, 301). The elegaic tone sometimes adopted by both sisters invests First Nations Canadians, as remnants of the past, with a romantic quality akin to that felt by their European counterparts for architectural ruins—indeed, even seems to identify Indians as a substitute for ruins in a New World lacking the “mouldering abbey, delapidated tower, ruin'd camp of Dane and Roman” desired by a contemporary Nova Scotian author seeking local inspiration (Shiels, preface). Thus, Moodie's engagement in a “dialogic relation with the other,” to return to Orr's phrase (155), is inevitably contained within an Imperial frame of reference that permits alterity so long as there is no threat to the prevailing structure of power. …

Notes

1. For comparisons of Indians with gypsies, see Jameson, II 108; Langton 22; Traill, “Visit” 39. Traill speculates at greater length on their similarities in her unpublished journal, NAC, MG 29 D81, vol. 3, p. 3465.

2. In this regard, Malcolm's Katie resembles earlier settlement poems that depict Indians as either savages or absent; see David Bentley: “In treating the Indians stereotypically and collectively as savages, degenerates, and transient hunters, the poets of Georgian Canada denied them status as individual people and as a multiplicity of peoples” (155).

3. A reconsideration of Scott's work as both bureaucrat and poet would be timely in light of Young's analysis of the competing discourses of racial purity and degeneration circulating during Scott's period of major activity (1885-1935).

4. Brooke slyly inserts her own feminist position into this account by having Ed's endorsement of the role of women in Huron government conclude, “I don't think you [women] are obliged in conscience to obey laws you have had no share in making” (35).

5. While Arabella soon retracts her admiration because she believes that European women enjoy greater freedom in their choice of a husband, Brooke establishes the falseness of Arabella's notion by having Arabella herself later recount the story of Lady H—, “sacrificed at eighteen, by the avarice and ambition of her parents, to age, disease, ill-nature, and a coronet” (279). Furthermore, it should be noted that Arabella's view of Native marriage is not historically correct. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994) 245-46, who states that marriage partners were often suggested by parents, but action was to be taken by the young persons themselves. It is curious that Dermot McCarthy's recent essay on alterity in The History of Emily Montague (ECW [Essays on Canadian Writing] 51-52 [1993-94]: 340-57) analyzes only Madame Des Roches, leaving the Indians an unexamined component of the book's “spectacle of otherness.” Also of interest is the notion that pre-contact Iroquois women enjoyed considerable political power, a point made by Pauline Johnson in 1906 (“The Lodge of the Lawmakers,” London Daily Express, 1906); and more recently by Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Literary Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986) 3.

6. Susan Beckmann, “A Note on Duncan Campbell Scott's ‘The Forsaken,’” Humanities Association Review 25 (1974): 32-37.

7. Some of Hemans's poems about North American Indians are: “The Messenger Bird,” “The Stranger in Louisiana,” “Indian Woman's Death Song,” “The Indian with his Dead Child,” “The Aged Indian” and “The Cross in the Wilderness.”

8. Similar statements appear also on pages 59 and 256, as well as in Anna Jameson's Preface.

9. Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime, eds. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael Peterman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); Susanna and John Moodie, Letters of Love and Duty, eds. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael Peterman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Catharine Parr Traill, I Bless You in My Heart: Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill, eds. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael Peterman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

10. Freiwald seems to have based her analysis on the truncated 1962 ncl edition of Roughing It in the Bush. As Buss discusses Anna Jameson's engagement with Native women in considerable detail, I find it curious that her analysis contains no mention of Moodie's references to Native women. John Thurston's The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie also pays little attention to her representation of Indians other than as polar opposites to the Yankees in Roughing It in the Bush (146-47).

11. Attention to early texts such as those by Moodie and Traill challenges Di Brandt's statement that Margaret Laurence “was really the early pioneer in fashioning a place for maternal narrative in Canada” (18).

12. She cites as her sources Francis Hall's Travels in Canada, Charles William Janson's Stranger in America and John Howison's Sketches of Upper Canada.

13. See, for example, her story “The Vanquished Lion” (1831), in John Thurston ed., Voyages: Short Narratives of Susanna Moodie (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991) 31-42. Moodie transcribed two narratives of escaped slaves: Negro Slavery Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner, a Native of St. Vincent's (London: Smith & Elder, 1831) and The History of Mary Prince (London: Westley, 1831); the latter receives substantial attention in Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) and in two essays by Gillian Whitlock: “Exiles from Tradition: Women's Life Writing,” in Re-siting Queen's English, eds. Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga: Rodopi, 1992) 11-23, and “The Silent Scribe: Susanna and ‘Black Mary,’” International Journal of Canadian Studies 11 (1995): 249-60.

14. There were Nogan families, whose names are variously spelled Naugon, Nogy, Noggan, Nogee, and Nogie, associated with both the Curve Lake Reserve and the Hiawatha Reserve (near Rice Lake) (see Traill, Forest and Other Gleanings 149). Michael Peterman now identifies the families that camped on Lake Katchewanooka in the 1830s as connected to the Hiawatha Reserve.

15. At this time, the Irish were constructed as more racially apart from the English than were people of colour. See Lynda E. Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the unrepresentable black woman,” in Hendricks and Parker, 36-37.

16. See, for example, my discussion of the likelihood that the real Susanna Moodie was far more alert than the narrated Moodie to the practices of “borrowing”: “Mrs Moodie's Beloved Partner,” Canadian Literature 107 (Winter 1985): 34-45.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) Conference at Duke University on 13 November 1994. I would like to thank David Bentley, Jared Curtis, Anne Goddard (National Archives of Canada), Michael Peterman and Elizabeth Thompson for assisting with various details.

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